At the entrance to the hall of the Aptekarsky Prikaz we are greeted by a large “accordion” camera on our feet, we read: a universal road, for the pavilion and the road, the McKelen system, is called “Acme”, just like the poetry circle of Nikolai Gumilyov. Behind it, human-size photographs of the 1900 World Exhibition are lined up, the Eiffel Tower looks out in the future, cardboard lady and gentleman with an umbrella are walking - such as they were in photo studios for entourage, mixing with live visitors of the exhibition - a theatrical effect, albeit not too much obsessive, provided. We are immersed in the scenery of black-and-white photographs, made part of a performance more than a century ago, the flourishing of imperialism, world trade, economic growth, illusions and hopes.
Any global exhibition, whether the Nizhny Novgorod fair, the Parisian fair of 1900, recognized as the most luxurious, that, for example, the recently opened biennale, is always a theater and a manifesto, styles and trends are born here and reinforce, exaggerate their existing trends. Fairy tale, holiday. Chronologically, the exhibition begins with the Crystal Palace of Paxton, for the museum keeps a stereopair with his photograph.
The Crystal Palace is the oldest hero of the exhibition, it was built in 1851. Further, after a few more exhibitions - for example, in 1878 with carved pseudo-Russian pavilions of Ropet and Hartmann, to which many modern ideas about the Russian hut go back, or in 1889, when the Eiffel Tower was built, the heroine of the same "main" exhibition of 1900, which looks here on us from all walls.
At some point, the history of the Russian national style sprouts from Parisian memories, even in addition to Ropet's "huts". For example, we learn that at the 1900 exhibition the architect Zeidler built a pavilion for Russian alcohol, and we rejoice at the relevance of the topic. Or we see the Russia-Asia pavilion of the architect Melzer at the same exhibition, painfully similar to what was recently built by good people on Izmailovsky Island. By the way, the copy Russian style in which the pavilion was designed was already an anachronism by 1900.
In a word, the exhibition in the Aptekarsky Prikaz is both a guide to stereophotography technology, old machines for shooting and viewing, and a tool for studying the history of architecture of world exhibitions, for example: "The Russian Pavilion of Ropet at the World Exhibition of 1878 became a kind of standard for Russian architects of the second half of the 19th century., - we read in the legends. Moreover, the line of Russian and European architecture was traced, including the "colonial" part, the pavilion of China and so on. Of course, the exhibition could be made larger, taking turns examining all the material on world exhibitions that is in the museum, with excursions into the stages of development of the national style.
But even so - good. Especially when - with some photos it is boring - the story is accompanied by real mechanisms for viewing stereopairs and other anaglyph, red-blue, glasses, and you understand how long ago all this was invented and became popular, that more than a hundred years have passed, and humanity has since not much advanced in the field of 3D, to be honest. And when for a snack we are offered to look through two eyepieces at the digitized stereo pairs, enjoy the effect of a picture that looks like a golden glowing hologram. And in the museum shop you can buy a modern device for viewing stereopairs in a tablet. In short, for all steampunk lovers - a mustsee.
